I can bless a death this human, this leaf 

the size of my hand. From the life-line spreads



a sapped, distended jaundice 

toward the edges, still green.



I've seen the sick starve out beyond 

the grip of their disease.



They sleep for days, their stomachs gone, 

the bones in their hands



seeming to rise to the hour 

that will receive them.



Sometimes on their last evening, they sit up 

and ask for food,



their faces bloodless, almost golden, 

they inquire about the future.



                    *



One August I drove the back roads, 

the dust wheeling behind me.



I wandered through the ruins of sharecrop farms 

and saw the weeds in the sun frames



opening the floorboards. 

Once behind what must have been an outhouse



the way wild yellow roses bunched and climbed 

the sweaty walls, I found a pile of letters,



fire-scarred, urinous. 

All afternoon the sun brought the field to me.



The insects hushed as I approached. 

I read how the world had failed who ever lived behind



the page, behind the misquoted Bible verses, 

that awkward backhand trying to explain deliverance.



                    *



The morning Keats left Guys Hospital's cadaver rooms 

for the last time, he said he was afraid.



This was the future, this corning down a stairway 

under the elms' summer green,



passing the barber shops along the avenue that still 

performed the surgeries, still dumped



blood caught in sand from porcelain washtubs 

into the road-side sewer. From those windows,



from a distance, he could have been anyone 

taking in the trees, mistaking the muse for this new



warmth around his heart—the first symptom 

of his illness—that so swelled the look of things,



it made leaves into poems, though he'd write later 

he had not grieved, not loved enough to claim them.